Until I Find You

June 6, 2005
Actor Jack Burns seeks a sense of identity and father figures while accommodating a host of overbearing and elaborately dysfunctional women in Irving's latest sprawling novel (after The Fourth Hand
). At the novel's onset (in 1969), four-year-old Jack is dragged by his mother, Alice, a Toronto-based tattoo artist, on a year-long search throughout northern Europe for William Burns, Jack's runaway father, a church organist and "ink addict." Back in Toronto, Alice enrolls Jack at the all-girls school St. Hilda's, where she mistakenly thinks he'll be "safe among the girls"; he later transfers to Redding, an all-boy's prep school in Maine. Jack survives a childhood remarkable for its relentless onslaught of sexual molestation at the hands of older girls and women to become a world-famous actor and Academy Award–winning screenwriter. Eventually, he retraces his childhood steps across Europe, in search of the truth about his father—a quest that also emerges as a journey toward normalcy. Though the incessant, graphic sexual abuse becomes gratuitous, Irving handles the novel's less seedy elements superbly: the earthy camaraderie of the tattoo parlors, the Hollywood glitz, Jack's developing emotional authenticity, his discovery of a half-sister and a moving reunion with his father. Agent, Janet Turnbull Irving.

July 15, 2005
Jack Burns, child of a tattoo artist mother and a missing organist father, has spent his life searching. As a boy he and his mother traveled throughout northern Europe to find his father; as a young man, he sought love and acceptance through a series of relationships with older women. Later in life, when the truth about his absent father continues to elude him, Jack finds himself questioning even his own memories. Irving's 11th novel may disappoint longtime fans -this is a quieter, more contemplative journey than his previous works (e.g., "The Cider House Rules"), requiring some patience and reflection. Journeys take time, and Jack, whose setbacks tend to involve women and his own insecurities, has a long road ahead of him. Irving's strength has always been his characters, and this novel is rich with them: Jack himself; his best friend, Emma; his no-nonsense psychiatrist; his distant mother and fun-loving father; and his teachers, lovers, and, yes, even his childhood sexual predator all come alive to make this novel a rewarding and meaningful experience. Recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ "3/1/05.] -Kellie Gillespie, City of Mesa Lib., AZ

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2005
Irving's much anticipated new novel is problematic. Some novels are simply too long, and this is one of them. The framework of the plot cannot support so much detail and so many prolonged scenes. It is basically a biographical novel about an actor named Jack Burns, his story told from his own perspective--which is one of the novel's "gimmicks": the reader sees Jack learning the truth about what he naively observed in his early years. Jack's mother is a tattoo artist and his father a church organist. But his father has long absconded, and when Jack was a child, his mother dragged him all over Europe in pursuit of his father. His young adult and adult life is taken up by a series of women finding ways to hold his penis. The thematic threads running through this exhausting narrative are the inaccuracy of memory and how we all have ways of disguising ourselves, but by a third of the way through this almost impenetrable tale, no one will care. The last quarter of the book would have made a decent novel on its own, with flashbacks to earlier events, and it is only in the last quarter, when Jack finally pieces together his father's life and whereabouts, that this book has life and a point; however, expect considerable demand from the author's loyal fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)